I would unite with nobody to do wrong

Wally Sierk tweeted a thread about chronically ill patients such as himself.

In areas where critical care is being rationed, I.e Lombardy, [Italy], comorbidities like diabetes and transplant are being used as reason to exclude patients from critical care. This means all critical care, not just CoVid19, so if I, or other people need care for another issue, we will still be triaged away from care. How bad the triage will get, I don’t know, but many non ICU hospital beds will be converted to ICU units, or post ICU care. So, a dialysis patient has 1-2 hospitalizations/ yr on average, either with infection, hyperkalemia, cardiac issues, and their hospital stay includes in- hospital dialysis. It’s not unreasonable to assume some portion of those routine hospitalizations will be disrupted and people will be excluded from care, because their aren’t enough rooms. This means that if you, or someone you love is chronically ill, with diabetes, kidney disease, or a transplant, this pandemic can kill them, even if they don’t get infected.

Rev. Magdalen tweeted:

Remember in the lead-up to J6, people said that Republicans' formal acts for the Big Lie "weren't sedition" because they weren't advocating violent overthrow? Yeah, that whole time violence was def being planned, by the people who later carried it out, for the same Big Lie. It's unbelievable that people who participated in the sedition will be allowed to sit on the jury of the man who incited it. This is not the reaction of a country that understands what just happened. Barring the one strongman for life isn't enough if the seditious org remains. The reason we don't let seditionists keep sitting after a failed insurrection is that they will try again, and this time when they give the insurrectionists tours, they might let them hide weapons in their offices, too.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos created a timeline of events aiming to overturn the election. He didn’t include most of the 62 lawsuits filed by the nasty guy legal team, because they had little consequence. He did list the important cases and the rest – signature challenges, efforts to get state officials to lie, using government to defy election results, and actual calls to violence. I counted 60 events in the list between November 4 and January 15 when the My Pillow guy urged the nasty guy to invoke martial law. And 14 of those were calls to violence. Sumner also reported on the evidence for the upcoming impeachment trial. The actual articles of impeachment are just five pages and the first of those is taken up with the names of the sponsors. Only four pages? There are also detailed supporting documents with all the evidence, a more detailed version of Sumner’s timeline. Sumner wrote:

But there is more than enough in the provided documents to show that the crowd that pushed through police to hunt hostages in the halls of Congress wasn’t just inflamed by a few offhand words Trump delivered on that Wednesday morning. The insurgency was the result of weeks of incitement and of planning by both Trump and other members of his team. It was neither spontaneous nor an accident. It was an attempted coup.

Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, tweeted a thread. He’s hounding Biden on government ethics, but not because he wants Biden to fail.

Presidential administrations don't get more ethical over time. They get less ethical, not because they're necessarily filled with bad people. They are filled with people who learn just how hard governing is, and those people get frustrated. They start looking for shortcuts. So whatever we get at the beginning of an administration is ALL we are going to get. And, trust me, whatever we don't get at the start of an administration is a conscious choice on the part of the administration --especially an administration like this one, filled with experts. Biden's team knows what it's doing. They had all the best people advising them. They KNOW what the watchdog groups want. They gave what they were willing to give. Anything lacking from the ethics executive order is lacking because a decision was made not to include it. … We need reform because the fascist movement won't die with Trump's presidency. The foreign AND domestic enemies of the republic are still out there. They will win some victories. They may win big ones. The future is not guaranteed. We have only a limited window of time in which to strengthen the republic and its anticorruption mechanisms. After that, whatever we have accomplished will have to be strong enough to withstand the next fascist onslaught.

Sahil Kapur of NBC News tweeted about what Elizabeth Warren said to Republicans who say unity is incompatible with impeachment:

How about if we're unified against insurrection? How about if we're unified for accountability? Unity starts with accountability. … Unity is about doing things the American people want to see us do: like a $15 an hour minimum wage, like canceling student loan debt, like expanding Social Security, like giving us more universal childcare and universal pre-K—things that are popular across this country.

Amazing Douglass added:

“I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.” Frederick Douglass Republicans fear uniting against insurrectionist because members the GOP Senate and House incited the insurrection — and they vaguely remember that a House / Senate divided cannot stand.

A geode is a rock that looks ordinary on the outside and is filled with crystals on the inside. Dr. Jacqueline Antonovich tweeted that she cut open a geode and found it looks like Cookie Monster of Sesame Street. She’s got pictures. I didn’t post last night because I took a break from blogging to watch the film IKARIE-XB1 offered by the Detroit Film Theater. It is a Czech film that came out in 1963 and is now considered a Cannes Classic. It is the story of a spaceship traveling from earth to planets around the star Alpha Centauri in the year 2163 and about what happens along the way. The actors spoke Czech and there were subtitles in English. DFT is offering online through the end of the month. Part of the admission price benefits DFT. Some thoughts about the film: This is an Eastern Bloc Cold War movie. One of the things they encountered along the way is another spaceship that left earth around 1987 in which some passengers got greedy and they all died. The style of the sets is very much 1960s projected into the future. The art on the image screens when they’re not showing something useful (like video from another part of the ship) was a style I remember from the 60s, though I don’t have a name for it to show examples. The crew consoles around the bridge did not have computers or computer screens. I was a little surprised how few controls there were at any one station. Several times the image screens show output from an oscilloscope. The special effects were very much limited to what was possible in 1963. This was three years before Star Trek on TV and five years before 2001: A Space Odyssey. The promos for Ikarie say this movie influenced Stanley Kubrick as he designed A Space Odyssey. Star Trek is known for various characters having to crawl through the “jeffries tubes” to secretly get from one part of the Enterprise to another. Yup, Ikarie had that first. The crew is shown doing their exercises to keep in shape. In these scenes the men are wearing only a 22nd Century version of the speedo and the women are wearing bikinis. This wasn’t great drama (though it wasn’t boring). It was more of an interesting cultural artifact.